AI agents and ecosystems contestability

In this issue paper, we seek to raise awareness of the importance of AI agents for competition and innovation in digital markets. AI agents (or agentic AI systems) exhibit a higher degree of autonomy, as exemplified in the scenario for an app-less phone, and therefore bear the greatest potential to disrupt the user experience and to provoke new product designs. However, AI models and services are foundational to AI agents and thus, the distinction between AI services and AI agents is generally blurred. In what follows, we offer a first conceptual framework and legal assessment of applicable regulation on AI agents, pointing to possible issues of categorisation and coherence. Importantly, our focus lies on AI agents on mobile devices and wearables, and not on general competition issues related to AI or mobile ecosystems, although the issues are of course connected.